13 ms·

Stop whining and start hiring remote workers

• casca 15y ago
  Hiring is hard. Hiring someone you've never met is a whole lot harder. Someone you know, have worked with before or from a personal recommendation? Sure. Some guy who you've assessed can pass a coding test? Not so much. As I'm sure many here have experiences, a great way to destroy a team is to get the wrong person. Remote workers should certainly be an option. But identifying that hiring local people is hard as "whining" is just high wankery.
  • sgdesign 15y ago
    The big advantage of remote work is that you can easily try out someone as a freelancer first before bringing them on full-time.
    • lrobb 15y ago
      I've asked this of recruiters before... Instead of flying me in to do a full day of white-board technical interviews, why not just give me a short project and see what I produce? It's mind-boggling how broken our hiring practices are, yet how easily it could all be fixed.
      • mfringel 15y ago
        If one works in complete isolation from other developers, then doing a "hand them a project, see what they produce" assignment would be a perfect way of measuring ability. There are certainly cases where that is true, but my experience leads me to believe that they are the marked exception, and not the rule.
      • objclxt 15y ago
        I have done this before, with some success - however, I think you might be missing the point slightly of a white-board interview. Yes, one purpose is to assess your coding ability, which you're right to say a short project could achieve. Another is to assess your ability to brainstorm and talk people through your ideas. If it was about coding ability alone you wouldn't need the whiteboard - you could just be sat in front of a computer. I can think of several people I've interviewed who have produced very good code, but have lacked the social skills required to integrate with a large team - even working remotely. So I don't think the solution is quite as easy as you think.
        • jebblue 15y ago
          I do really badly when placed in front of a white board and am asked to code. This is a ridiculous concept, imaging taking Anthony Bourdain into a room and telling them to use the whiteboard to describe a tough cooking challenge.
        • lrobb 15y ago
          Your take on the whiteboard is interesting, and I can definitely see value in that. Of all the interviews I've been on however, it wasn't about brainstorming at all. It was a test to see how well you knew your data structures / algorithms. Examples: Solve a variation of the 8 queens problem; Determine if a graph is acyclic; etc...
      • devs1010 15y ago
        some companies just want an ass in a seat and giving you a remote project doesn't accomplish this.
  • dhh 15y ago
    We generally never hire anyone we haven't seen before, unless there's overwhelming evidence that they'll kick ass. For example, we hired Pratik Naik from London and it took more than a year before he met anyone else in the office (couldn't get a visa). For everyone else, we fly them into the office to determine if they'll be a good social fit. If so, they're hired and fly back home to get work done. Works great!
• conformal 15y ago
  funny enough we are based in chicago and do the same thing: hire people who work strictly on remote. almost everyone gets along fine on remote, but sometimes management of remote employees is a serious pain. it's much easier to shop for talent and get the best devs and sysadmins vs people in the area.
• sgdesign 15y ago
  I can't agree enough with this. I help startups find designers through my site (http://folyo.me http://folyo.me), and it's been all but impossible to find great designers available in the bay area. On the other hand, the rest of the country (and the world) has tons of really good designers, some of which struggle to find work. So far the companies who have gone the remote route haven't regretted it, and they've been able to avoid spending countless hours searching for a local hire.
  • gexla 15y ago
    Great designers having problems finding work... That's the unfortunate part of freelancing. The most amazing developers might be horrible with the marketing / business end.
    • da02 15y ago
      It might also have to do with how creative people are more likely to feel dirty fulfilling the wishes of the boss when they are wrong. Which might explain why your local restaurant would overpay for Flash heavy websites on eLance rather than hire someone on Folyo.me.
  • amccloud 15y ago
    Contact me; email is in profile. My co-founder runs a pretty well known designer meetup in the bay.
• systemizer 15y ago
  I'm going to have to disagree. As a developer, I would highly prefer having my co-developers in the same building, if not the same room with me. It's about having that certain "hum" of energy in your environment that you can only achieve if you are immersed in it yourself. It's also a cultural experience to be sharing the same environment with your peers. More importantly, I don't want have to abide by some API to interact with another developer. Hell, if I want to play toss with a nerf football with one of the other developers, I should be able to do that (of course, if the want is mutual). Which technology will allow me to do that? I worked at a startup last summer. The developers and I would hangout outside of the "war" room, playing call of duty, grabbing some beers, or whatever sparked our interest. The times outside the workplace are often the most memorable in a job.
  • shazamjad 15y ago
    I will add to this - I worked for a company last year where the majority of projects were outsourced to a team setup in Egypt, and I spent more time debugging their work than it would've taken me to do it myself. Not to mention how off the spec most of their work was and our clients were always left dissatisfied. I think that's part of the reason I left within a few months. Remote working is amazing provided you can get a solid, self motivated person or team who are on the same wave length as you - but it's incredibly tough.
    • plinkplonk 15y ago
      "I will add to this - I worked for a company last year where the majority of projects were outsourced to a team setup in Egypt, and I spent more time debugging their work than it would've taken me to do it myself." To be fair, DHH isn't talking about outsourcing to dumb but cheaper devs. He is talking about hiring really good people, who won't or can't move to San Fransisco (or wherever), and probably cost as much or close as devs in SF. I doubt 37 Signals hires remote workers who check in code that has to be debugged before it works. iow I am saying, respond to what DHH actually said.
      • gexla 15y ago
• gexla 15y ago
  Colo workspaces are a great way to get the best of both worlds. Working remotely but still being in an office environment with other developers. Not everyone has this option but I find it's a great way to switch things up when you need to get out of the home. I imagine good remote workers could also be difficult to find, simply because many of them already likely have a ton of work coming in. Running your own show also gives you a lot more flexibility, so taking on an actual job can be a bit of a sacrifice.
• mylons 15y ago
  I also wish current employers were more willing to do this. I've had managers in the past negotiate their own remote employment, but REFUSE all requests from their underlings to do something similar.
  • nvk 15y ago
    Yes, this is a very common practice.
• Mz 15y ago
  I don't have experience with working remotely but I do have experience with taking classes online. My experience has been that they expected more out of you as an online student, that there was no "credit" given for "face time" (ie "warming a seat"). It's easy to fall out of touch with what employees are really doing right in the same room, especially with knowledge workers. We often have no real idea what is going on at the computer screen in the next cubicle, to a degree I find rather shocking. I kind of feel like people have their head in the sand if they think simply being in the same room as a knowledge worker somehow gives them an idea of what they are up to. Edit: I don't have first hand experience working remotely myself. I do have coworkers who work remotely.
  • kaybe 15y ago
    Instead of surfing the net when I have a low I look around to find someone in a similar position and make them tell me stuff about what they are doing. It can help us both. :)
• latch 15y ago
  In my experience the real problem is that people are much worse at hiring/interviewing than they think they are. Their process is broken, their questions are weird and the amount of time they are willing to dedicate to it isn't sufficient. Hiring isn't easy, it does get easier with experience, provided you actually look at it as a skill you can/need to improve (which the vaste majority of people don't).
  • jt2190 15y ago
    "people are much worse at hiring/interviewing than they think they are." Yes. What needs to be asked is: "Are you ready to hire remote workers?" with a laundry list of items, such as: * Do you know how to communicate effectively with remote workers? * Do your team members know how to communicate effectively with remote workers? * How will you correct things when your team members forget to include the remote members on meeting invitations, emails, etc? * Does the remote worker know how to communicate effectively? * Does the company have a way of supporting remote workers? (Network, hardware and software support.) * etc. My point is that making effective use of remote workers is much easier said than done.
• edw519 15y ago
  Everything we do to manage a business consisting mainly of remote employees is something anyone else could do too. I would modify "anyone else" to "anyone else enlightened enough". Big difference. It's still amazing how many managers/leaders are so bad at managing/leading that all the tools in the world wouldn't make a bit of difference. You know who they are, the people for whom: perceived activity = progress meetings = progress being there = progress lines of code = progress check marks = completion social skills = competence perception = reality what's on the surface = what's underneath # of tasks completed = an acceptable metric successful testing = quality software smiling customers = satisfaction 90% complete = only 10% more to go Good managers know better. So they can take advantage of OP's tools. The technology for managing remotely is clearly ahead of the people who would most benefit from it. I look forward the the day when managers catch up and "get it".
  • m_for_monkey 15y ago
    > smiling customers = satisfaction I think they are right about this one. What's your problem with this?
    • lwhi 15y ago
      Often the customers aren't the end users. I suppose a job can't always be considered to be done well, just because the customer is provided with what they felt they needed. Sometimes the customer is asking for the wrong thing in the first place.
      • doktrin 15y ago
        While I can see the reasoning behind this mentality, I have a hard time supporting it unequivocally. Too many times I've come across what really feels like engineer / developer arrogance vis a vis their end users. The notion that the customer "doesn't know what's good for them" has a bizarrely patronizing air to it. If the customer is happy, then the product has done it's job. Doesn't mean it can't be improved - but perfection comes after the customer has quit bitching.
  • deleted 15y ago
• gyardley 15y ago
  I've got a question for DHH - or really, anyone with a widely-distributed team: how do you deal with the administrative overhead of hiring employees in a lot of different jurisdictions? I've used Ambrose in the past, and they could handle the administrivia associated with employees in most American states, but they were no use internationally. And 'professional employer organizations' like Ambrose often only work with organizations that are already doing well (or well-funded).
  • blumentopf 15y ago
    Contracting instead of hiring is a decent workaround in my opinion. A lot of great people who work from remote are already full-time or part-time freelancers and are totally open to long-term engagements. It's as simple as sending an invoice by the employee/freelancer and sending a check or wire transfer back.
  • tibbon 15y ago
    When I've had to handle a large, distributed and international team I mainly just had almost everyone on as a contractor. This wasn't us trying to deprive them of benefits or underpay them, but really was what most of them wanted. They wanted flexibility and the ability to work in a somewhat non-dedicated way. Worked for everyone involved since the paperwork was really minimal.
    • marquis 15y ago
      Be careful doing this, as there are official rules whether someone is a contractor or not, not just 'because I call myself one'. You can in theory get hit for payroll taxes. http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=99921,00.html http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=99921,00.h...
      • noonespecial 15y ago
        I actually really like this set of rules. It keeps nit-wit bosses from calling you a contractor and then micromanaging you like an employee. On the balance they favor those who really do want to be contractors.
• lrobb 15y ago
  I've telecommuted for over 10 years now... Last year I was given the "opportunity" to look for a new gig, and was horrified to find that the vast, vast majority of software companies are still stuck in a manufacturing mindset: show up at the factory, do your 8 hours (or 10). Even worse are the "local candidates only" job posts.
• hunterp 15y ago
  As a remote worker, I say, DON'T hire remote.
• DanielBMarkham 15y ago
  Okey dokey. I clicked on this thinking "hell yeah!" and stopped short of agreeing after reading it. Why? Because although I agree with the author, his argument is too shallow. Here's the thing: delegating to remote workers is going to be the critical skill of the first part of the 21st century, and it's not as simple as black and white. So it's not just "do it all the time" or "only use local help" It's much, much, much more complicated. I work with a lot of technology companies, and I've seen them kill perfectly good projects by poorly-configured remote worker configurations. If you don't know what you're doing, you're better off with 4 guys working in the same room than 40 guys working all over the world. See "The Mythical Man-Month" (http://www.hn-books.com/Books/The-Mythical-Man-Month.htm http://www.hn-books.com/Books/The-Mythical-Man-Month.htm) Technology labor is not fungible. The social dynamics of teams physically co-located can create powerful momentum. Serendipity is about 20 times harder to do over a telephone. "Get up to speed on remote working practices" contains a lot of nuance. For instance, I've seen teams fly in remote workers for the first few sprints of a project, then going "truly remote" once the rhythm and cadence was established. I've seen teams pair up with each pair working in a different location. I've seen teams work mirror configurations where they still paired up, but each pair was separated. Each of these setups (and many more) have their advantages and disadvantages. So yes, by all means, leverage the terrific talent and resources available to you around the world. But don't read a slogan and go running out to shoot your foot off. Take some time and figure out what kind of company you are, what kind of culture you have, and what kinds of projects you do. Then grow and evolve your remote working to fit in with that. Don't be the guy who already has the solution and is just looking for the problem. Remote working is the key to the new century, but it's nowhere as simple as flipping a light switch.
  • equalarrow 15y ago
    I love the 37Signals guys and opinions, but this is where I greatly differ with them. Case in point. I worked at a place where at one point, everyone was remote but me. I could have been remote, and sometimes I like working from home or a cafe or wherever. But for team morale and even with phone or video conversations with the other devs, it became totally demotivating after a while. I was contracting with that company and joined years later as a ft employee. Engineering consisted of about half a dozen and we were growing. We started to notice that it was 'hard' to hire anyone local, so they just gave up (accepted maybe?) and ended up going with a contracting company and almost doubled the team with everyone new being offsite. Standups became something that was no longer fun because there was so much emphasis on looping in the remote people - screwing around with the video camera, trying out this video service, etc, etc. Come tomorrow (1/12), everyone at that place will be remote and they'll have lost pretty much all of the local devs for various reasons, me included. Building a team can be hard. But I don't buy the "we can't find anyone local" argument and if I was building a team, I want people local. It's definitely a programmers market right now, but if you want to hire local, then you have to go out and get creative - go to user groups, meetings, etc. It can be done and I've seen it both ways. Local, to me, is just hard to beat. I want people engaged with each other and don't want to have to Google+ someone on video every time I have a question for them. That said, I'm fine with some days a week where local people work remotely, but to have everyone or some 100% remote is not a good idea in my mind. You don't develop 'company culture' that way. If everyone's remote, there's no one to have a beer with after work and talk about the latest coding issue, problem, point of interest, socialize, or whatever. Guess that's just the difference with getting the work done vs. enjoying your work and the people you work with.
• donky_cong 15y ago
  If you are preaching something like this, atleast have the decency to go all the way. Why are all the examples of "remote" in US/UK ? There are 7 billion other people. And I can assure you there are amazing Indian, Japaneese, German, Russian, Finninsh and Australian devs. Thats the real big pool of talent. (And you can get some prime developers at lower than $100K/year).
  • SingAlong 15y ago
    >> And I can assure you there are amazing Indian, Japaneese, German, Russian, Finninsh and Australian devs. >> And you can get some prime developers at lower than $100K/year Totally agree with that. I work remote from Bangalore for a YC startup. I can't say if I'm "amazing" or "prime". Before I got hired, I had a bunch of opensource projects which I had passionately crafted for personal use. But I do get paid on the far lower side of $100k. I joined on an independent contractor agreement just the next day after I finished college. About managing tasks: we do 5-minute meetings every day and discuss what each of us are working on. I'm curious to know what kind of legal work is required to hire remote workers outside the country (US) and how the hires are compensated.
    • spiredigital 15y ago
      I looked into the requirements when hiring abroad, and the IRS makes it insanely confusing (surprise, surprise). I finally determined that I had no U.S. payroll/withholding responsibility as my foreign employee was outside the U.S. and did all their work out of the U.S. For payment, I use xoom.com to transfer bank-to-bank. Its worked out well for international payments so far and their fees are reasonable.
      • SingAlong 15y ago
        My pay is being sent via international bank transfers. Costs about $20 (on my end) which is fine with me. It takes about a day but I believe it's reliable.
  • dhh 15y ago
• ultimatewarrior 15y ago
  The social dynamics of teams physically co-located can create powerful momentum. Serendipity is about 20 times harder to do over a telephone.
• tibbon 15y ago
  For people talking about the lack of face time for remote workers, might I suggest proposing to potential employees that they spend 80-90% of their time offsite, and 10-20% of their time working onsite? I live in Ohio for example. At some point I really wouldn't mind working for a company in NYC, SF or Boston. Actually, I'd enjoy it since it would give me a chance to escape the midwest with a greater frequency. I'd have zero problem working a week a month in one of those cities. I just can't move to a new location fulltime right now. I have good friends in all of those cities and don't need hotels every time (just pay for my transit costs and I'm set). Yet, hiring employers view location of workers as being a binary of 0 for always offsite, and 1 for always onsite. The most reasonable thing appears to be striking a middleground.
  • noonespecial 15y ago
    Funny thing I've found though, a company that will gladly drop $3k to change a few colors and a font on a web form will sometimes throw a fit over reimbursing a $350 plane ticket. Not all dollars are equal.
    • jebblue 15y ago
      I think that's a brilliant observation and accurate.
    • baddox 15y ago
      That's the cheapest round trip plane ticket I've ever heard of.
      • mikeash 15y ago
        I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I just punched in an arbitrary roundtrip from Columbus, OH to NYC and got several options at $355 including all taxes and fees.
        • baddox 15y ago
          Not being sarcastic, I had just never seen one that low. I've flown only a handful of times (between SF and Missouri, usually booked about a month or two in advance), and the cheapest round trip option I had ever seen is $600.
• djb_hackernews 15y ago
  To add an anecdote: I was recently contacted by a recruiter helping out a company in an area in the south that wasn't in a very hot market talent wise. So they were expanding their search for senior level developers for a 6mo contract. A few emails were sent back and forth, and obviously the recruiter always wanted to know my rate, but I kept deferring until I had more info... eventually it seemed like a pretty good fit, so I gave them an hourly rate I'd expect that was reasonable - It was about market for my area (DC) and below some of my other contracting rates. I got a curt response from the recruiter explaining the company was only offering an amount that was over 30% below my quote (A pretty good tell this is a recruiter I don't want to work with anyway). The message mentioned my rate was quite high for someone not on site. (It was very clear this was for a remote position, and I would not be relocating) If you are going to hire remote, does it make sense to expect a discount? Especially when you are reaching in to more expensive markets?
  • Bootvis 15y ago
    No it doesn't make any sense. I guess the recruiter can always try though...
  • cunac 15y ago
    only if you will not do same quality work as on site in which case I wouldn't recommend to hire you anyhow
  • joshcrews 15y ago
    A complicating factor is the recruiter's take on top of your rate. I'm making up numbers, but lets say your rate is $100, and the recruiter's % is 40% of your rate. Now the company sees $140/hr. The company may not object to your rate if they found you directly, but your rate + recruiters expense is more than they were expecting. But all you hear is, "hey bud, that's a little too high of a rate, isn't it? Why don't you come on down to something a bit more conservative" And your rate isn't too high, its just too high when he adds in his cut.
• ryanackley 15y ago
  I worked remotely for a year and half and later worked from home for my own business. From my own perspective, I found it unsustainable. Mainly, there are the psychological benefits of working around other people that the internet can't replicate. These were the stages I went through when I landed my remote job back in 2004: 1. Euphoria. I was finally free of cubicle hell! I couldn't believe my luck of landing a job working remotely. I could start and stop work whenever I wanted. I could even take a nap after lunch 2. Contentment. I was more productive. I was being judged on results only. All is good. 3. Isolation. I started to feel a little left out from from the happenings at the main company office. I would hear stories about company gatherings and events. When I was at the office, I wouldn't get any of the inside jokes or stories about the "crazy" night I wasn't there for. 4. Insanity. Must...get...out...of...the...house... Also, career development is really hard working remotely. Most people are fine being an individual contributor early in their career but once you've been in the industry for 10 years or so, you'll start thinking about what's next. I'm more satisfied coming into the office at a company that gives me flexibility to be myself and work the way I want than I was working remotely from home. YMMV.
  • dhh 15y ago
    Two things. We've definitely found that this setup works better with people who already have strong social ties present. Close by family, friends helps, but spouse + optionally kids really does it. Also, at 37signals the career path is not one that leads into management. If you're looking to climb the ladder at a bigco, then sure, I wouldn't recommend remote working.
  • technomancy 15y ago
    I worked remotely for two years out of LA as one of two engineers for a tiny startup, and that describes my experience there perfectly. I've been working remotely for the last three years out of Seattle, and it's totally different. Part of it is the availability of plenty of coffee shops from which to work (http://technomancy.us/156 http://technomancy.us/156), part of it is having more hacker friends locally with which to co-work, but a lot of it comes down to just having a lot more communication with my remote team. At my last job I spent the majority of the day pair programming over SSH and VoIP. Also, being the one remote guy on a team that's otherwise all in-house is much, much harder to pull off.
• vnchr 15y ago
  "SHUT UP AND USE ALL OUR PRODUCTS"
• shareme 15y ago
  I have a question... I was introduced to a multi-disciplined and multi-cultural environment early in my college studies and on top of it it had a remote component in the mid 1990s. I found that the skills in communication and people skills to converse with multiple areas of university study and cultures across many human languages,etc was the skills I needed to remote effectively both as an individual worker and as a manager. Am I missing something or have no one else discover those aspects yet?
• kenneth 15y ago
  People who blindly argue for working remotely don't understand that there's a huge difference between getting shit done and building a company. You can't develop a company culture without putting people together, physically. If your goal is simply finish executing on that spec, and if you see workers simply as a resource to be optimized, then you're right and remote workers are the cheaper, more efficient way to go. But if, on the other hand, what you're building is the company itself: a team of smart, like-minded people who like each other and work well together, there's no substitute for physical proximity. Happy hours, being able to see what everybody else is working on, and working alongside everybody else with delivery pizza at 9pm when in crunch mode… these are things that build camaraderie between team members. It's similar to a group of soldiers in the trenches: you need to know that your fellow soldiers are your friends, and that they've got your back. The whole is more than the sum of its part. But only when you have a great company culture gluing the parts together—with remote workers, the whole is just the sum of its parts.
  • nirvdrum 15y ago
    The other side of this token is every single person I've seen complain about getting passed over for a gig because they didn't want to relocate (there's a lot of them on Twitter) is only interested in putting in their hours and doing a job. Arguably there's nothing wrong with that. But when building a company, I want people to care more about than just lines of code. Actually, I want people to do that in general (I have worked at bigger companies too).
    • dhh 15y ago
      I've found this to be completely false for every one of our remote workers. Nobody at 37signals fits that description and as mentions in the article, the majority works remotely.
      • nirvdrum 15y ago
        That's good to hear. I've really only had success with people willing to work some time in the office or who would have relocated, but we allowed to work remotely (this is over several companies). The folks that absolutely demand working remotely don't carry themselves well in public channels, which is likely the root of my stereotyping.
• moocow01 15y ago
  One thing I've realized about working remotely is that it is actually quite a big pay raise if you use it correctly. The type of work-related things that usually cost money/time can be much more easily eliminated like... - commuting costs (no need to buy that 2nd car and pay insurance) - commuting time (arguably time = $) - lunches and food (make your food/drinks at home) - ability to take care of little things during non-rush hour (ex. going to the post office when there are no lines) All in all, you could probably find ways around these for non-remote jobs depending on your situation but I've found I save about $1000 a month from working remotely. This translates to about a ~$1400 dollar bump in salary per month when you take into consideration that Uncle Sam takes ~30%. Difference of ~16-17k for me annually but everyone will have their own number. And this doesn't even take into account the possibility of living in an area with a lower cost of living.
• hello_moto 15y ago
  But DHH, BigCos aren't 37Signals... ... then he went on a rebuttal saying that BigCos are wrong model and everybody should be like 37Signals, small, lean, mean, and can declare bankruptcy in the face of a huge lawsuit. That's the key. BigCos operate at a different level set of requirements. Here's one example: scrapping content from websites. When you're RIM, you're a target of lawsuits if you crawl and scrap people's website for your Blackberry News Reader. When you're Flipboard, people wouldn't know/care as of now (at least until they're big enough to milk cash out of them).
  • dhh 15y ago
    Plenty of BigCos have teams who work remotely. Often the teams that work on the most interesting, new stuff (because they tend to be smaller and more agile than the folks manning the sausage factory).
    • jebblue 15y ago
      This describes me for the past several years. It makes it challenging when dealing with managers who assume all humans must want to climb someone's ladder but remote work is fulfilling nonetheless.
    • hello_moto 15y ago
      Keyword is "teams". Not "workers" (individuals). Remote team is a group of people who work together in a branch somewhere. That's a big difference.
• ROFISH 15y ago
  I always question the use of Skype. It's great for video chat, but it requires somebody to call and somebody to host, and it gets real nasty when you need to get work done and just want to talk for like two minutes. I recommend getting up a Mumble server. It's voice chat, but anybody can join in at anytime, or go to a private "room" to talk amongst themselves.
  • krallja 15y ago
    This is exactly how we use Ventrilo at Cheezburger. Skype is better for back-and-forth conversations; Ventrilo is better for status updates.
  • jebblue 15y ago
    Mumble is in the Ubuntu repositories, client and server that's cool and it's encrypted. I'll have to keep that one in mind. Thanks.
• nvk 15y ago
  Me and my Co-Founder decided that since we don't like to be in offices, everyone that works for us (Ripe Apps Inc.) don't have to either. We've let go of the the physical space, we collaborate by Skype, IRC, e-Mail, Google Docs, DropBox, once every week or two over burgers/lunch, and if we need to convey something that is not coming trough the line with contractors we meet at a cafe for an afternoon. We also don't hire manager, we only deal with people who can self manage.
  • devs1010 15y ago
    I worked for a company like this, honestly I didn't really like it, at least the meeting in cafe's part, personally I find the comforts of an office superior in this regard as a conference room with no distractions and a projector beats sitting in a noisy cafe huddled around a laptop. I'm not against the not having an office idea completely but I think that if I were to be involved in something like this again I would want them to at least have one of those "shared spaces" offices where you can go in sometimes to work collaboratively and have access to conference rooms, etc.
    • billswift 15y ago
      One thing that can work, if you only need a day here and there, is to get a motel room to use as a meeting room/conference room. Even fewer distractions than an office and you don't have to pay for it when you aren't using it. (We did this a few times in the 1980s/90s when I was working for an architect, when we needed a meeting place near a job.)
      • devs1010 15y ago
        Nowadays I think most cities they have spaces that can be rented on an hourly basis that are suited for this purpose (beyond hotel rooms)
    • nvk 15y ago
      In those cases i have the Team come to my House or the Condo's Amenities Floor, lot's of quite room and wifi. But yes, this arrangement is not for everyone.
• loceng 15y ago
  It's pushed and promoted as what you need to do in order to get investment because VCs feel there's less risk that way. I guess the alternative is you don't get your product built.
• mechanical_fish 15y ago
  You can write code remotely (probably even better than you would in an office) and you can deliver and debug and do maintenance remotely, but it's very hard to do politics remotely. When it comes to convincing people, the person or team on the scene has a built-in advantage over the disembodied person on the phone or the net. This is just human nature. Monkeys gotta monkey. Yes, yes, it used to be that the person on the scene had a much bigger advantage, and now thanks to our awesome telepresence technology the advantage is smaller than it used to be. Whatever. The advantage is still there. Blame time zones, blame the limited field-of-view of cameras, blame subtle sounds that only locals can hear, blame the fact that it's easier to establish rapport by talking about the weather when everyone is experiencing the same weather, blame out-of-band signaling of every sort, from sharing the same pizza at lunch to sharing the same hallways and parking lots to sharing the same air. You can fight this by deliberately leveling the playing field: Force everyone to be remote most of the time, from day one. 37signals built their company this way. (And they also attracted and hired excellent writers; that's not a coincidence.) But if you don't foster that culture from day one it is hard to bolt on after the fact. Particularly because the culture of written communication and the level of writing skill needed to make remote interaction work doesn't arise overnight and doesn't grow on trees. You need to practice being an effective distributed organization. And the problems with being remote won't always be obvious - indeed, as I said up front, the code may well be better, because offices are such unproductive workspaces. But the problems will arise when politics arise, as they do in any group larger than a given size. It will be harder to move up or around in the organization. It will be harder to sell ideas to co-workers from other departments, the ones who don't work with you everyday, because the social grooming is so difficult. It's not just because of tax law that most remote workers tend to be contractors, and that so many contractors dream of starting small product businesses. The culture of business-to-business contracting is better adapted to working in writing and over distances, because there's several hundred years of cultural experience to draw upon: We have contracts, we have lawyers, we put stuff in writing. Selling a product to someone through the mail is even more formalized: People expect to read brochures, to get the product in a circumscribed package, to sign a contract and pay by the hour before putting in a tech support ticket. Contrast all this with the employee-employee relationship, which tends to be egalitarian and communal and rely a lot on subtle mutual teambuilding and backscratching that are difficult to virtualize.
• PanMan 15y ago
  I think remote work can work well for a well defined problem. However, for small startups often the product is changing while it's being developed. Also the energy and team feeling are different when working remotely or in the same office. It is for a reason Y Combinator wants everybody to join them in the same office.
• spiredigital 15y ago
  A few takeaways from what I've learned after 4 years of experimentation with outsourcing / hiring remotely in my own full-time online business: - Turnover can be a problem. I went through 3 part-time workers in the course of 6 months because they moved on to bigger, better projects. The hourly rate was great, but the re-training and inconvenience was a nightmare. When my third iterations employee for the position ended up being a rock-star, I worked HARD to make her feel like part of the team, encourage her, and gave occasional bonuses even though she was an hourly, outsourced worked. She's been with me for 2.5 years. - Hiring full-time, salaried employees in your time zone is EXPENSIVE, but eventually necessary in you want to free-up your time, grow the business and maintain quality. For a while, I really put off hiring a full-time operations manager, instead trying to work with professional, part-time remotes in a time zone 7 hours ahead. I saved a little money but dealt with tons of logistical problems. If your employees are solely building a product, this might not be an issue. But if they have any time of consistant employee communication, time zone shifts can get complicated. I finally bit the bullet and hired a full-time, local operations manager despite the expense... ...and it has been worth it. I was able to interview face-to-face, which I think is important for critical positions, and ended up with a guy who I 100% trust with the operations of my company. I spent 7 months last year traveling internationally, and was often out-of-touch and 12+ hours ahead of my business and customers. Without a local, full-time employee to manage the business for me that I trusted, there's no way I could have done that. I possibly could have found someone remotely to do this, but I would have had to spend a LOT of face time with them for training, and to feel comfortable at a level where I'd leave for an extended period. In summary, I've found a combination of remote and local employees really works best. Remote outsourcing offers a LOT of great talent and potential, but it's no panacea; there are plenty of logistical issues to be considered. But with the right planning and local/remote diversification, it can be a great tool for growing your business.
• tirrellp 15y ago
  I've mentioned this before, and its interesting to see it being pointed out by more than just me. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813915 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813915 Some options for the talent crunch are: 1. Grow your own talent from inexperience 2. Pay for relocation 3. Entertain telecommuting. 4. Build a satellite office in an area where there seems to be a mass of talent. Bay area companies take note, San Diego is absolutely crawling with unemployed talent.
  • zem 15y ago
    I wish more companies were willing to consider option 1. it does mean a few months of less-than-ideally-productive time while they ramp up, and a corresponding time commitment on the part of the senior devs to handhold them while they learn, but you get some very passionate and dedicated employees out of it. also, they don't have any bad habits they're attached to (:
• ntomkin 15y ago
  > 37signals has people from such distinct tech hubs as Fenwick (Canada)... I hate strong statements that have the out of being tongue-in-cheek. Fenwick is not any type of tech hub. It's a high rural area with the closest mid-sized city (St. Catharines) about 50 km away.
  • dhh 15y ago
    Dude, that was ironic. None of those places are tech hubs. That's the joke :).
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  • randomdata 15y ago
    I sure it was a joke, but do not underestimate rural Ontario. Thanks to the unfortunately now historic funding structure of the education system, Ontario poured massive amounts of money into rural technology. I cannot speak for the Fenwick area, but here in the most agriculturally productive area of Ontario, the schools had high speed internet access back in 1994-1995. Most of the schools in the city were lucky if they had dialup, if internet at all. Labs full of SGI machines when SGI was a major player. Remote video-conferencing classrooms. You name it, we probably had access to it. As a result, we seem to have a disproportionate number of skilled tech workers. I am really quite amazed at the talent that has come from this small farming community.
• quesera 15y ago
  As usual, I think 37S is mostly correct here, but they've omitted some crucially important qualifiers. I often wonder whether this is genuine myopia/naïveté, or whether they are crafting a subtext that serves their larger PR and marketing goals (i.e. obviously this can't work everywhere and in all cases, but look how close our realities are to our idealized case! Oh and by the way sign up for our services because they will solve your problems!). Anyway, I've worked on and managed distributed teams, spread over 14hrs of timezones. What I've learned is: You need good people. They need to take absolute responsibility for their work, and they need to be highly cooperative and reliably honest. They need to care. You need the _right_ good people. They need to be professionally fulfilled by the high quality of their work as well as the team's work. They need enough adulthood or experience to do all the little things to compensate for the reduced bandwidth, like spending an extra 30 seconds on commit messages or ticket updates. They need to make the extra effort, sometimes. They need to get their human quota of social interaction, status affirmation, deep bonding, etc elsewhere. They need to want to get stuff done at work and have another healthy center of life gravity somewhere else. It's probable and hopeful that the team will all become friends, but there's just too much drama and/or inefficiency if the team constitutes a member's whole social circle. You need need a strong and coherent plan, especially around product vision and strategy. If things are still very fluxy or in-pivot, and you need everyone to be highly cooperatively creative, then there's no substitute for getting everyone together and eliminating all of the communications friction and overhead. Once the plan is internalized, you can disperse. Minor perturbations can be handled remotely. Major ones suggest reconvention. You need good leadership. This can be de facto or even cooperative, but someone needs to take organizational and facilitating roles, and the rest of the team needs to have a focal point. Obviously if you are a team under some umbrella of org chart, this needs to be the titular manager, and he or she has to manage upwardly even more actively than within. ... The absolute hardest part is hiring those good, right people. The technology is 100% there (and I think the 37S suite is OK but generally end up falling back to lighter weight options). Remote work attracts the highly professional and the highly useless. If you're hiring people without a trusted recommendation, differentiating between the two can be difficult. You're looking for people who are talented and scrupulously honest, especially about weaknesses. People who are lying to you are often lying to themselves, and people who are lying to themselves are always lying to you. There's no place for that in a distributed team. It's very important to cut quickly when you fail with a hire. There's no shame in not being the right person for a job, but it's the hiring manager's duty to take improvement very very seriously. The highly professional will not tolerate bad teammates under these special-needs circumstances, nor the bad management that permits them. When remote teams fail, it's because management and hiring have failed. It's not so much harder as different -- but different is hard, for some styles of managers.
• rob41 15y ago
  I am still amazed with how few design jobs are available remotely. I hope more companies start using distributed teams.
• danmaz74 15y ago
  The reality I know is that there is much more work to do than what only the really talented, self managing, committed developers can do. So we (I mean "society") also need to be able to put the not-so-talented, and/or not-so-committed, and/or not-self-managing developers in the conditions to be productive - which isn't working alone from home. So, I completely agree that remote work should be leveraged much more often, especially as remote collaboration technologies are getting better and better, but this won't be the one-size-fits-all solution. Just like the traditional 9-5 office isn't.
• hkarthik 15y ago
  I work in a completely distributed team and I think it works well if you have the right demographic in your team. The one problem I see with the model, is that it does little for junior developers or interns that are just starting out. There's a minimum bar that a developer has to reach before I think they can work in a distributed team. Folks just starting out need a bit more hands on mentoring and the distributed model makes that difficult. I wouldn't hire an intern, or fresh college graduate into a distributed team. I think the issues around the talent crunch have something to do with not enough people in the field. Going distributed solves the problem of needing experienced folks, but it does little for newly minted developers.
  • devs1010 15y ago
    Agreed. I worked in a remote-ish situation early on where the people were in town but didn't have an office so I worked from home most of the time. I feel I've definitely progressed a lot more now since I started working in an office, but then there is a point again where you can get enough experience to where working remotely may be the better option, but starting out I agree its not necessarily the best option.
• balloot 15y ago
  I don't get what it is about software engineers that make so many of them think they're entitled to work remotely. It seems to start with the fact that many engineers think 100% of their job is coding, and therefore they can get "more" work done when working remotely. This is absolutely dead wrong. Engineers also should be accomplishing the following in order to maximize overall productivity: - teaching other engineers - learning from other engineers - coordinating engineering tasks to minimize duplication - doing what is necessary to ensure the software is what is needed - communicating with others any insights that may be had while developing - working with other departments to make sure everything is in place to build whatever it is you're building. This is just what I can come up with off the top of my head in 2 minutes, and each of these things takes a significant hit when the engineer is working remotely. Any engineer I would want to hire has quite a bit more to offer than coding skills, and as soon as you require more than a basic automaton blindly building a product exactly to spec, you need human interaction with that person to maximize potential. We already learned this lesson a few years ago with the total failure of "all software can be outsourced to India!" I don't see why we need to learn this again.
  • mkramlich 15y ago
    good sw engineers are rare and in demand plus, we have many tools and telecommunication technologies which let us communicate and work remotely. Some people have learned that traditional corporate offices are full of things that make them less happy or less productive. Distracting sights, noises, interruptions, makework, politics, inability to say what you really think, having to act and dress artificially, inability to say take a nap when you feel you need it, arbitrary arrival times, hampered ability to switch over to non-employed tasks when needed (family things, a FOSS project, another contract gig, etc). Some find it patronizing as well. There's also the notion of maximizing for happiness rather than purely money. Also a smart actor in any economy will use whatever leverage he has to maximize his own interests. If the demand/supply balance happens to favor sw engineers right now they would be wise to take advantage of it. Businesses and governments do it too. Also, some individuals are broadly talented, beyond just being a programmer, and it's much easier for those folks to exercise and monetize a broader range and depth of their skills if they aren't kept in the narrow straigtjacket of a specific employer's job role, and place and time of business. Being a remote worker makes it much easier to lead a hybrid life where you spend some time on entrepreneurial side projects since less time wasted on commutes and you can handle interrupts from those side projects without political shit from your "day job". You can make $100k/year as a FT programmer, a good life to be sure, but the most likely path to making millions is by starting a business. And that path is easier to try if you're a remote worker or contractor. And yes, I know there are positives and advantages to office life as well, please no need to chime in and enlighten me there. been there, have the t-shirt, but there are lots of other t-shirts. :)
• pg 15y ago
  "Stop whining" should really be "stop looking at the empirical evidence," because so far all the really big successes have been focused on a single location, especially at first. 37signals is a successful company certainly, but I would be surprised if its value is 1% of Google's.
  • balloot 15y ago
    I would be surprised if 37signals value is .1% of Google. Google's market cap is a little over $200B, so .1% makes for a $200M company.
    • deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    • bigohms 15y ago
      Valuation, sure. If the numbers ever get out, be seated at the time. It's a very lucrative product.
  • deedorgreed 15y ago
    and yet it's not necessarily around big successes. companies aim to exit modestly all the time (not every company can be a google) i run a company that employs "remote workers" but all centered around one city so that there is some in-person interaction and 4-6 big meetings across our two offices. i think the compromise between the talent demand "problem" and finding remote workers scattered across the world is to pick a 2nd/3rd tier city that's reasonable and set up shop there. it's worked for us and i don't think we're any company special.
  • cconroy 15y ago
    I am really wondering whether physical proximity of the employees, empirically, has a reasonable relationship to early success? A pure guess (based on personal preference) is a mix of remote and local working, favoring remote -- would still produce big successes. (Although, this balance should be kept flexible depending of the state of which the project demands.) This could stem from programming requiring a mix of social and private time, which works naturally with local and remote working.
• Badkangar00 15y ago
  funny, I use IM with someone that sits next to me.
• rglover 15y ago
  I'm glad to see this being discussed. As a designer/front-end dev, I find working remotely to be personally rewarding and immensely productive. Going to an office all day is not fun and with all of the distractions, it makes work even more difficult. Being remote removes these barriers. This is great because when you need to get a project done, you can have hours of uninterrupted time and knock stuff out. There is one major caveat, though, in that IT'S NOT FOR EVERYONE. Whether it be that you thrive in a communal environment, work better in teams, or just can't get your work done without being babysat, some people just don't cut it. For companies, it's an excellent way to diversify your team and build an international presence. It's 2012. We have the Internet, phones, and airplanes (if an office visit is truly necessary). Get into it.
• venturebros 15y ago
  I love how Automattic runs http://automattic.com/work-with-us/ http://automattic.com/work-with-us/. I have been sifting through a lot of these posts and I think everyone is forgetting not everybody is a Software Engineer. There are other components to a business too. I can say as a front-end developer I certainly do not need to be tied to a desk 8 hours a day every single day to code up a mockup. Yet when ever I see a job I would be perfect for I get told they do not do remote work.
• dboyd 15y ago
  What is gained in hiring remote has a cost. A significant percentage of human communication is non-verbal[1]. When hiring remote, make sure to put "communication skills" near the top of the requirements, since any hire is going to have to make up for the loss of presence. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_language
• lxt 15y ago
  I agree 100% with this blog post. I have worked remotely for Mozilla for the last four years: first as a senior dev, now as an engineering manager with a team of currently 7 people. My team is located in Africa, Europe, and North America, and we work closely with ops people located in the US and Asia (Singapore, India), as well as people in other parts of the company in a number of other timezones. I believe more than half of the Mozilla workforce is remote from an office. This includes places like Portland OR which has more than 10 Mozillians, but no office. Some riders: - We work hard at being remote friendly. We all spend all day in IRC. We put people's timezones in the phonebook. We make extensive use of IRC, the phone, Skype, teleconferences, Vidyo, email, Bugzilla, wikis, and etherpad. We get together throughout the year - sometimes a couple of people, sometimes just our team, sometimes our group, sometimes the whole company, sometimes at an office, sometimes at a brewpub or cafe, sometimes at a conference. - We actively screen for remote suitability when interviewing people who want to be remote. - If people are in a country where we have an office they are employees, if they are in a country where we don't they are FT contractors ("geo-contractors") but we treat them like employees in every other respect. I think it makes life a touch harder for our admin staff, but they are awesome and take it in stride. I've been doing this for a while, it's the best thing I've ever done, and my team kicks butt.
• amac 15y ago
  Remote is fine right, if that's your choice in business. Surely though, the joy is in building something with others - products, services, cultures etc regardless of success or failure. If your business is your life's work, I can't see any greater pleasure than sharing it with others.
• nate 15y ago
  This post from DHH misses one bit. This hiring remote workers works for them, (as it's worked for me/us at Inkling and Cityposh) because we also have another tenant to our hiring practices. We hire people who can manage themselves. 37signals calls this "managers of one" http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1430-hire-managers-of-one http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1430-hire-managers-of-one. I like to think of it as hiring employees to boss me around http://blog.inklingmarkets.com/2009/10/hire-employees-to-boss-you-around.html http://blog.inklingmarkets.com/2009/10/hire-employees-to-bos... The companies complaining about remote workers not working for them is also because they are surrounded with people that can't do their work unless they have constant group think meetings so no one can possibly be blamed for the work/decisions being made.
• parbo 15y ago
  The only silver bullet is to get a number of people together who are passionate and skilled. The assignment really doesn't matter, as long as it spurs an emotion in the team.
• JoeDeveloper 15y ago
  I have been working remotely for the past ~4 years and it has proven to be one of the most productive approaches for me. I find that meeting many of the "challenges" of managing distributed teams end up being worth much more than just the ability to hire quicker and from a broader pool. Distributed teams and asynchronous communication ( email, wiki, tickets ( and comments to them )) coupled with knowledge repositories ( such as internal stackoverflow clones etc ) allow formal, persistant capture and presentation of best-practices within the team, without a large upfront cost and 'documentation rot'. Having to verbally explain something to each new member in turn strikes me as much less efficient than being able to point to written documentation and a centralized place to request information or clarification. It also helps ensure that goals and approaches are actually captured clearly, rather than assumed based on nodding heads. Tools like assembla.com ( full disclosure, I have done work for them ) and other team / project management offerings with integrated source control also serves to capture raw metrics to allow better estimations going forwards and better pinpointing of areas that need strengthening. It is often said that adding new members to an existing project can extend the duration of the project, as experienced developers need to spend time on getting others up to speed than actually working on the deliverables themselves, by building this documentation into the process as a whole that cost can be amortized, shared across the team and contribute to knowledge transfer even among high-value members. By embracing ticket based development, it means that people can continue working on something else if they come across blockers or are waiting on feedback for whatever they were working with before. It also means that developers can choose tasks that they find compelling or have otherwise non-obvious synergies with their background / recent tasks. While working in that kind of environment I manage 55+ productive hours / week pretty easily, and with pleasure - as have many of the people that I have worked with, by virtue of minimal administrative overhead and being able to 'stay in the flow' working on tasks in a self-directed manner within the context of goals for a particular iteration. Capturing the value-add of developers via tickets ( though obviously imperfect ), tends to minimize social manipulation of managers in terms of who did what. The persistent record of ticket comments, code review input, code commits, and other exchanges works to increase transparency - accountability and value can have a firmer ground to be evaluated. The biggest problem that I find with preferring to work as a telecommuter is how few companies seem to be open to hiring under those conditions. I have had offers where the only sticking point was that I needed to relocate to New York, or California, or Amsterdam, or Brisbane, or Singapore .. etc. They are all great places, or well, fine places at least, but I am pretty content being surrounded by rice fields and having chanting monks strolling by now and then. If you could use a telecommuting fullstack / JS Engineer - let me know :)
• unfletch 15y ago
  Does anyone have pointers to good resources for workers looking for remote positions?
  • JoeDeveloper 15y ago
    Ditto that. There are sites like freelancer.com, elance.com etc - but there is considerable overhead involved in vying for short-term gigs and negotiating terms etc. I worked those sites for about 2 years and it was actually very gratifying and instructive - I built everything from twitter spiders to usenet picture google widgets and customized more e-commerce setups than I care to think about. It is definitely worth doing to test your mettle against players from all over the world, but ultimately it becomes a grind and a chore, there is a huge long tail of "5 pages + contact form" and "penny auction" clones that offers little opportunity for personal growth - especially at the race to the bottom prices that is the norm. unfletch, if you are into Rails then I know that Assembla.com is always looking for fresh talent.
• JoeDeveloper 15y ago
  Apropos: A few days ago a discussion about just this topic was started at http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=86567916&gid=2204708 http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=... A recent poll was started at: http://www.linkedin.com/osview/canvas?_ch_page_id=1&_ch_panel_id=1&_ch_app_id=1900&_applicationId=1900&_ownerId=0&appParams={%22section%22:%22results%22,%22poll_id%22:159960}&trk=email-polls-title-results http://www.linkedin.com/osview/canvas?_ch_page_id=1&_ch_... Where the vast majority of respondents said that they value work experience over location - but from my reading it just highlights how there seems to be a mindset that is blind to the value propositions presented by telecommuting. Here is a short video on Distributed Agile: 5 DOs and 5 DON'Ts from assembla.com - having worked there, I find that it works amazingly well.
• timedoctor 15y ago
  I'm basing my entire business around this idea of hiring people remotely, and now have a new startup staff.com which is about hiring people from any location. LOTS of problems to be solved with remove hiring and remote working: 1. Are the team actually working each day (many people need the discipline of coming into the office) 2. Are they moonlighting with multiple companies at the same time 3. How do you get a sense that you are really part of one team, a feeling of connection 4. Communication issues related to working remotely 5. Hiring effectively without actually meeting in person 6. Maintaining a sense of team and having people feel like they are part of a team (even when not meeting in person). This is very important as part of maintaining a sense of loyalty and connection with team members. My personal experience in managing over 50 staff members in 9 countries is that all of these problems CAN be solved, but it takes work. My ideal situation is to meet 4 times per year in person, but sometimes this is difficult when staff are really in completely different locations.
• drcoopster 15y ago
  As a remote worker, I can't agree more with the article. I've heard this many times: "You're a great candidate for this job, but right now we're looking for people who are local."